Cassian wrote three orders.
Each contradicted the others.
First.
`Release every prisoner in the North Gate sewer.`
Second.
`Seize the presses on Western Printer's Road, but do not burn the paper.`
Third.
`Disarm the believers in the cathedral cemetery, but do not kill them.`
Toma dripped a different wax onto each sheet.
Three Black Feather Society couriers left through separate doors.
Before the first wax dried, a bell rang.
The same order was carried out at all three execution grounds.
`Kill the witnesses.`
`Burn the ledgers.`
`Bring us the saint's ghost.`
It was a fourth order Cassian had never written.
Toma stood before the empty desk.
"There is a traitor inside the organization."
"Which of the three?"
"I do not know yet."
"None of them."
"Why do you think so?"
Cassian threw the fourth order at Toma.
The paper was new.
The ink was dry.
The signature was identical to Cassian's.
But the letters appeared only in the reader's memory, not on the page. The sentence remained even with the eyes closed.
"It arrived before the couriers."
Ria studied the order.
"It chose only things you might do."
"I do not kill witnesses."
"You do when you need to."
"I do not need to now."
"The crowd does not know the difference."
Adel looked at the wrist from which her name had vanished.
Only her pulse remained.
"Then who gave the order?"
"I did," Cassian said.
Ria narrowed her eyes.
"You said you did not write it."
"To them, I did."
He opened the map of the three-way funerary waterway.
"So we go to all three."
Ria took Western Printer's Road.
She sewed the original order into the inside of her clothes. Even if they seized the paper, they could not forge it without tearing through her body first.
Adel went deeper beneath the cemetery.
To the believers waiting for the dead saint's ghost.
Toma descended into the North Gate sewer with Cassian.
It was the route guarded by the comrades he had betrayed.
"May I cover my face?" Toma asked.
"Why?"
"Six of the seventeen names I wrote are down there."
"Good."
Cassian handed Toma a white lantern.
"Stand where they can see you best."
Black paper flowed through the sewer instead of water.
Thousands of Cassian's faces cut from *Blood Weekly*. The soaked illustrations covered the surface, smiling with the same expression.
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Twelve prisoners were bound to the wall.
Accountants from the North Gate guild.
Distribution workers who had opposed the copycat executions.
A storekeeper who had testified that Cassian had not killed them.
The first original order was to release them.
The believers were placing ropes around the prisoners' throats.
"Stop the order!" Toma shouted.
Six believers recognized him.
"The traitor came."
"I was the one who wrote your names."
"We know."
A woman placed a black feather on her tongue.
"That is why we do not obey your orders."
"This is Cassian's order."
Toma opened the original.
`Release every prisoner.`
The believers read it.
Then they laughed.
"Cassian does not release witnesses."
"He does when he needs to."
Cassian stepped out of the darkness.
The believers stopped laughing.
None of them had seen the real Cassian.
They looked between the illustrations on the walls and his face.
One man asked, "Prove it."
"Prove what?"
"That you are Cassian."
Cassian removed his glove instead of answering.
His rejuvenated right hand.
Human teeth growing beneath the nails.
The believers stepped back.
Another Cassian's voice came from behind them.
"He is a fake."
The Feather Proxy walked forward.
It had no face.
Hundreds of black feathers overlapped to form only the shape of a human head. Execution orders curled inward where its mouth should have been.
Its body belonged to a gaunt man.
Its voice belonged to hundreds.
"The real Cassian never proves his own orders."
The believers nodded.
Eyes appeared on the proxy's face.
Cassian's eyes from the market illustrations.
"The real Cassian never leaves witnesses alive."
A second eye.
"The real Cassian never brings a traitor with him."
Lips and a jaw appeared.
The more people believed, the more of Cassian's face the proxy gained.
Cassian drew his sword.
His aged left hand missed the scabbard. The one rib Adel had set held through his breath, but all the others remained broken.
He held the sword in his right hand alone.
The elbow was still bent backward.
The proxy spread its arms.
"Try."
Cassian erased the distance in one step.
His sword split the proxy's chest.
The wound was deep.
No blood came out.
Instead, shallow cuts appeared across the chests of forty believers.
One death had been divided into the pain of forty people.
The believers fell to their knees.
The proxy's chest closed.
"We love your wounds," the forty said.
"That is not love."
Cassian cut through the proxy's knee.
This time, the legs of twenty-six believers broke at once.
No one died.
The proxy stood again.
"Then what is it?"
"Insurance."
Cassian cut the ropes around the prisoners.
He tried to reclaim the objective first without killing the proxy.
Each time one rope broke, a believer placed a new rope around their own throat.
They were ready to hang in the prisoners' place.
"Let them go!" Toma shouted.
The woman whose name he had written in the betrayal ledger answered.
"You sold us. Who are you trying to save now?"
"Do not die."
"The Cassian you wrote told us to."
The blood drained from Toma's face.
The fear, rations, and ledgers he had made were binding his comrades' throats.
Cassian looked at the believers' sinmarks.
There was no sin in choosing to take the proxy's wounds.
They had offered their own bodies.
There was sin in using that choice to kill the prisoners.
The two records were tangled inside the same flesh.
Weight of Sin would break both together.
Cassian did not use it.
Instead, he stabbed the proxy through the throat.
A thin line of blood ran from the throats of one hundred believers.
Not one throat was cut.
The proxy spoke.
"You cannot kill us."
"Because there are too many of you?"
"Because we love you."
On Western Printer's Road, Ria's original order tore.
The sensation reached the shape nailed to Cassian's shadow.
Ria was trapped between the presses.
The printers tried to tear the original from her clothes. Their knives cut cloth and flesh together. Ria did not release the paper.
The presses printed thousands of copies of the fourth order.
`Kill the witnesses.`
Ria pressed her blood onto the original.
`Cassian did not write this order.`
The two sentences fought inside the press.
One sheet of fact.
Thousands of belief.
To preserve that one sheet, Ria pushed her body between the press gears.
The machine stopped.
Her left arm was crushed with the paper.
Deep beneath the cemetery, believers surrounded Adel.
"Seize the saint's ghost."
They reached for her.
Some were wounded. Each time Cassian cut the proxy in the sewer, the same wounds divided and reached this place.
Adel took the first patient's pulse.
"Do you consent to treatment?"
"I cannot consent to a dead person."
"Then I will not treat you."
The second believer held out a hand.
"I consent to Adel Venati."
"She is dead," Adel said.
"Then to whom must I consent?"
Adel could not answer.
The moment Cassian killed her name, she had lost the self who could sign for her own treatment.
A third woman spoke.
"I consent to you, not the name."
Adel looked up.
"To the person holding my hand now."
The words did not become a record.
Neither Church nor law recognized them.
Adel did.
She treated only the third woman.
The others watched, bleeding.
In the sewer, the proxy smiled with Cassian's face.
Cassian did not smile.
Each time he did, the broken ribs pierced his lung.
He drove his sword into the proxy's chest again.
The believers swallowed their screams.
"You will take the next wound too," Cassian said.
"And the one after that."
He pushed the point toward the proxy's heart.
For the first time, belief wavered in the believers' eyes.
Saying they loved his wounds was different from receiving the next death.
A crack opened across the proxy's Cassian face.
"Yes," the proxy whispered.
"That is an order worthy of you."
Beneath the cracked face appeared the mouth of an older man.
Toma recognized it.
It belonged to the former leader who had founded the Black Feather Society.
The proxy smiled with bloodied teeth.
"You become worthy of us only when you abandon us."
Three black threads emerged from the former leader's mouth.
The first was tied to the ropes of the twelve prisoners.
The second ran to Western Printer's Road and wrapped around Ria's crushed left arm.
The third held up the ceiling of the cemetery. If it snapped, Adel and the believers would be buried together.
"You want me to choose whom to abandon?" Cassian asked.
"No."
The old mouth looked at Toma.
"Give us back that traitor."
"And then?"
"We release the prisoners, open the press, and clear a path for the ghost."
Toma looked at Cassian.
"Do not make the bargain."
Cassian seized Toma by the nape.
He threw him before the former leader.
There was no hesitation.
Toma rolled across the wet stone.
The six people whose names he had written in the betrayal ledger rushed forward and seized his arms.
"I expected this," Toma said.
The former leader's mouth smiled.
"Liar."
Black feathers entered Toma's throat.
The three threads had not yet broken.
Wearing Cassian's face, the proxy asked,
"How does it feel to be abandoned by his command, Toma?"
Toma swallowed blood.
Then he spoke aloud the order Cassian had never given.
"Execute Cassian Crow."